I hear a death rattle in the night.A soft moan in the distanceSuffuses the atmosphereWith longing. Passing cars playAn inhuman music, their howlsDrifting in from nearby highways,Dying notes on a harmonica.There is a perfect stillnessTo the land of motion, nothingStirring in the tall grasses.Tomorrow, they will be beatingThe war drums, a foreknowledgeOf the disaster moving […]
Category: Poetry
The ghosts are hungry – Robert Alan Rife
The ghosts are hungry for more. But chiming bells overflow the glass and teeth chatter in the gray sun. There is music in the gravel tide, washing up like red medicine – bloodied capsules of cotton-talk, gauze-word, suture-see. It only gags the throat of a traffic laden wood. Clouds crippled by the old songs, […]
Invoking Laozhi – Yuan Changming
Hiking along a less trodden trail in the Pacific SpiritForest, I almost have to stop to find my Way outBecause all roads have led me to nowhereBut I keep walking until it is almost Laozhi himselfPointing his fossilized fingers towards Dao(Which he says is no ordinary Way if it canBe named. Similarly if I can […]
Journey without Maps – Howie Good
We must be lost. As the driver, I should really know where we are. We drive around to get asense of place and pass payday loan shops, the bloated carcass of a dog, streets with holes. Ateenage girl writhes on the sidewalk, her right leg splayed at a gruesome angle, her facecontorted with pain. Huddled […]
In Their Time #25 – Darren C Demaree
The childrenare all blade-thin& that shouldserve them wellfor awhile. They’llhave to be thickto live long enoughto becomethe whole world,but for nowthey pop the locksof any doorthey wish to enter. . . Demaree’s poems have appeared, or are scheduled to appear in numerous magazines/journals, including Diode, Meridian, New Letters, Diagram, and the Colorado Review. He […]
Subdivisions for the newly dead – Benjamin Blake
This endless sprawl of stonesEach polished to perfectionSit behind towering black gatesGreek-pillared mausoleumsHouse mummified housewivesStagnant infinity pools overlookChoked deadened lawnsEven the dogs are deceasedCrawled under the digger’s shedTo die aloneFlowers cut, and dried a brittle brownFamily portraits faded from a scorched earth sunThere is little, or no, sustenance hereDelivered from sinInto the arms of […]
Survival of the Fittest – Howard Debs
The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of theinstinct of sympathy. …………………………………………………………………..—Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man She is juststarting out in lifeshe is fed by amachine breatheswith the aid ofanother machinetake away themachines, she dies.She is on a bus drivingin darkness to reachWashington D.C.she […]
ID – Duane Vorhees
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School Shooter – Eric Robert Nolan
Grendel’s mother wanted murder; but we all knew that, you knew that just by looking at her: the green and odorous skin like dark olive parchment over her cheeks’ low bones, the blackening teeth where the stale blood caked and dried in her receding gumlines like burgundy ink on her molars and incisors, and […]
Song for the Street Dogs – Jake Tringali
Raise a toast to the lowlife brahmin! Leave Boston to the Street Dogs! The lawyers and doctors and learned universities Left the city in droves, should be hanged for atrocities They called it the Incident, clapped their hands and just left Packed up their hedge funds, emptied the city coffers and hope chests […]